Current
ProjectsBaltimore
Ecosystem Study Phase III: Adaptive Processes in the Baltimore
Socio-Ecological System from the Sanitary to the Sustainable City
PI: S. Pickett; co-PIs: P. Groffman; M. Cadenasso; C. Welty; J.M Grove Sponsor: NSFProject Web Site: http://beslter.orgThe
Baltimore Ecosystem Study (BES) was initiated as an LTER project in
1997, designed to understand the controls and interactions of urban
ecosystem structure and function. This project will continue that
long-term line of research and will expand it to address 3 fundamental
issues: 1) The spatial and temporal relationships of socio-economic,
ecological, and physical features of an urban area; 2) The fluxes of
energy, matter, capital, and population in an urban area, and the
development and relationships of these over time; and, 3) The ways in
which people develop an understanding of the metropolis and use such
understanding to reduce air and water pollution. The research
integrates ecological, hydrologic, and social perspectives and research
techniques to understand the human ecosystem and provide knowledge of
relevance and utility for management of urban ecosystems and their
neighboring environments. This project contributes to understanding
of the structure, function, and dynamics of a metropolitan area, and
includes development of techniques for better understanding
socio-ecological and urban ecosystems in general. It assembles and
integrates valuable long-term data sets from paleoecological,
historical, and contemporary time-frames. The project has broad
societal value through its contributions to improved management of
urban ecosystems and its focus on techniques for reducing environmental
pollution and degradation. Its broader values also include extensive
research-based training, educational program development, and public
outreach programs.

Regional Climate Variability and Patterns of Urban Development – Impacts on the Urban Water Cycle and Nutrient ExportPIs: C. Welty, AJ Miller, M.
McGuire, J. Smith, E. Bou-Zeid, S. Kaushal, P. Groffman, A. Gold, M.
Grove, E. Irwin, C. Towe, A. Klaiber, E. Doheny
Sponsor: National Science Foundation, Water Sustainability and Climate ProgramThe goal of this project is to evaluate the interactions
between urban development patterns and the hydrologic cycle and its
associated nutrient cycles, within the context of regional and local
climate variability. Our specific objective is to create a modeling
system capable of simulating the feedback relationships that control
urban water sustainability. We are addressing the following
research questions: (1) How do human locational choices, water-based
ecosystem services, and regulatory policies affect the supply of land
and pattern of development over time? (2) How do the changing
composition and variability of urbanizing surfaces affect local and
regional climate? (3) How do patterns of development (including the
engineered water system) and climate variability affect fluxes, flow
paths and storage of water and nitrogen in urban areas? Core
elements include spatial modeling of urban development patterns and
individual land use and location processes at parcel and neighborhood
scales and for different policy scenarios; three-dimensional modeling
of coupled surface water-groundwater and land surface-atmospheric
systems at multiple scales (including consideration of the engineered
water system), where development patterns are incorporated as input;
and field work and modeling aimed at quantifying flow paths and fluxes
of water and nitrogen in this system. We are using the Baltimore
Ecosystem Study LTER (http://beslter.org), as a platform for
place-based research to carry out the work.

Integrating Climate Change into the Restoration of the Chesapeake Bay and WatershedPI (UMBC): Claire Welty; PI (U MD): M. Palmer; co-PIs: S. Filoso (CBL), L. Harris (CBL), C. Swan (UMBC), M. Williams (CBL) Sponsor: NOAA
The Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries have been ecologically impaired
from stressors including intensive agriculture and urban
development. These land uses are associated with increased
impervious substrate that increases the magnitude of stormflow and
associated nutrient and sediment fluxes, resulting in erosion and
reduced biogeochemical efficiency and aquatic biodiversity. Best
management practices are being used to mitigate the deleterious effects
of development, yet how climate and land use changes will interact with
these factors is unclear. To better understand the impact of
these anticipated changes, our interdisciplinary approach combines (1)
development of a conceptual model of factors responsible for
restoration and recovery of streams and freshwater wetlands in the
Chesapeake Bay watershed, (2) empirical research directed at filling
important gaps in our understanding of these factors related to stream
and freshwater wetland restoration effectiveness and biodiversity, (3)
integration of empirical experimental data derived from these projects
with anticipated climate and land use changes to determine how these
factors will affect streams, rivers and freshwater wetlands and their
restoration effectiveness, (4) development of coupled
groundwater/surface water mathematical models of flow and nitrogen
transport to enable integration of spatial and temporal climate and
land use changes anticipated within the Chesapeake Bay watershed, and
(5) the advancement of a spatio-temporal data warehousing system that
will enable data storage, retrieval, and mining of empirical and model
data generated by this project.

Green Infrastructure for Urban Landscapes (MD)PI: Stuart SchwartzSponsor: National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, Chesapeake Bay Innovative Nutrient and Sediment Reduction Program
The goal of this project is to assemble a showcase portfolio of green
infrastructure projects that advance applications of pervious concrete
and subsoiling in urban landscapes. The project will target key
institutional obstacles to adopting these technologies, including
specifications, training, performance monitoring, and long-term
maintenance. The project includes sites in Baltimore's Inner Harbor and
Charles, Montgomery, and Anne Arundel Counties.

CDI-Type II: GLOBE: Evolving New Global Workflows for Land Change SciencePI: Erle Ellis; co-PIs: T. Oates, W. Lutters, T. Finin, P. RheingansSponsor: NSF
This project will accelerate the emergence of new global workflows in
land change science through GLOBE: an online collaboration environment
combining quantitative real-time global relevance assessment,
geovisualization, social-computational structures and machine learning
algorithms. This will be accomplished in collaboration with
international Land Change Science (LCS) institutions and experts,
enabling researchers and institutions to rapidly share, compare, and
synthesize local and regional studies by combining these with global
datasets for human and environmental variables using a combination of
machine learning, advanced visualization, semantic analysis and social
networking. The project has four core objectives that will be achieved
through the integrated activities: (1) creation of an online
collaboration environment leveraging real-time global relevance
analysis, geovisualization and social-computational knowledge
generation towards the generation and sharing of new global workflows
for land change science; (2) understanding how to build effective
social media tools organized around structured and informal scientific
workflows; (3) development of evaluation methods and
metrics and use them to demonstrate the utility of workflow-based
social media tools in the context of scientists testing LCS hypotheses;
and (4) leveraging GLOBE to characterize and optimize global knowledge
generation in LCS.

ABI Development: Ecosynth: An Advanced Open-Source 3D Toolkit for Forest EcologyPI: Erle Ellis; co-PI: T. Olano Sponsor: NSF
This project will develop Ecosynth, an open-source 3D toolkit for
scanning woodland ecosystems based on recent innovations in
computer-vision technologies coupled with an online community system
for browsing, sharing, visualizing, tagging and analyzing 3D scans of
terrestrial ecosystems. This project aims to transform the practice of
field ecology in woodlands by enabling the routine and frequent
acquisition, use, and sharing of 3D scanning data by both ecologists
and citizen scientists. Ecosynth 3D scanning technology applies
Structure from Motion algorithms to images acquired in the field using
ordinary consumer-grade digital cameras, including camera-equipped cell
phones, deployed in computer-optimized patterns on the ground or from
the air by hobbyist remote controlled aircraft. The Ecosynth toolkit
developed by this project will be offered as an open-source development
resource on the community website
(http://ecotope.org/projects/ecosynth/)

Collaborative Research: The role
of network topology and environmental filtering in shaping the ecology
of spatially structured communitiesPI: Christopher Swan; co-PI: Matthew Baker Sponsor: NSF
Why are species found in certain combinations and not others? Why are
some species not found in habitats that seem suitable for their needs?
A fundamental goal of ecology is to understand the processes that drive
patterns in species occurrence. An organism's "local" environment can
exert influence on where it occurs, e.g., climate, competition for
resources, and disturbance. However, "regional" factors - such as the
ability of organisms to colonize available habitat - are also
important. This project addresses two fundamental questions: 1) What is
the relative importance of local versus regional factors in controlling
species composition? 2) How does that relative importance shift with
elements of landscapes, and the ability of organisms to move across
those landscapes? The project will address these two questions
using communities of aquatic invertebrates in river networks. The
project takes advantage of stream restoration activity, which almost
always includes large-scale habitat modification. Three types of
approaches will be employed to address the research questions: surveys
of restoration sites, experimental manipulations of local factors -
specifically stream-bottom habitat features - in river systems, and
experiments using artificial streams to control for both local and
regional processes.

CNH: Urban Disamenities and
Pests: Coupled Dynamics of Urban Mosquito Ecology and Human Systems
Across Socioeconomically Diverse CommunitiesPI: Shannon LaDeau (Cary
Institute of Ecosystem Studies); Co-PIs: Paul Leisnham, Dawn
Biehler (UMBC), Sacoby Wilson, Rebecca Jordan. Sponsor: NSF
This project will test whether urban social and economic decay and
urban infestations of mosquitoes feedback upon one another and, if so,
how to break this vicious cycle. Research in Baltimore, Maryland, will
examine whether features of urban decay such as population decline,
abandoned lots, and unmanaged refuse promote mosquito production and
whether this in turn discourages care for and use of the outdoor
environment by residents and exacerbates urban decay. Comprehensive
sampling in three focal neighborhoods will quantify the association
between the abundances of mosquitoes and the physical and
socio-economic status of neighborhoods, and how mosquito exposure
influences resident support for and participation in outdoor activities
and urban revitalization. Experiments will identify activities that
best support and motivate resident-led strategies to control
mosquitoes.

Combining bioavailability assays with modeling to predict PCBs in fish after remediationPI: Upal GhoshSponsor: National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences
Ecological and human health impacts of bioaccumulative contaminants
like PCBs are primarily manifested through accumulation of the toxic
compounds in higher trophic level organisms like fish that are consumed
by humans and top predators in the ecosystem. However, changes in fish
are slow to manifest as a consequence of a remedial action and often
one has to wait for several years to see such change. To make timely
assessments of remediation progress, one alternative is to perform
appropriate measurements that indicate changes in key pathways of
exposure to fish. Although some advances have been made recently to
assess porewater concentrations using passive sampling techniques which
respond more rapidly to in-situ remedies, relationship of such measures
to accumulation is fish has not been demonstrated. Also, there is a
major gap in the development and utilization of fate and biouptake
models that can use passive sampling measurements and quantitatively
link those measurements to uptake pathways and predict eventual changes
in fish concentrations. This project will refine sampling methods to
assess PCB uptake pathways and work with practitioners to incorporate
such measures into PCB fate and biouptake models to assess changes in
fish concentration over time, and validate the approach through
controlled laboratory exposure studies and measurements in the field.

Recently Completed Projects

Pervious Concrete: Technology Demonstration and Information NeedsPI: S. SchwartzSponsor: Chesapeake Bay TrustAmong
low impact development hydrology practices, pervious concrete and other
pervious paving systems offer great promise for on-site,
infiltration-based storm water management in urban and suburban
development. Despite this potential and a substantial body of
proven experience with the material, pervious concrete is not widely
used in the state of Maryland or the Chesapeake Bay watershed. To
overcome the barriers to successful specification, design, and
regulatory approval of pervious concrete as a valuable element in
integrated site design, the goals of this project are to develop (1) a
well-instrumented pervious concrete demonstration site with long-term
monitoring for performance evaluation and (2) educational and outreach
workshops to deliver design, specification, installation and permitting
information to regulators, practitioners, and community
stakeholders. The project integrates field demonstrations and
education and outreach workshops with rigorous site monitoring to
address the need for consistent knowledge and information that
currently limits the effective use of this material as an integral
component of sustainable site design in the state of Maryland and the
Chesapeake Bay watershed.

Baseflow Signatures of Sustainable Water ResourcesPI: S. SchwartzSponsor: Harry R. Hughes Center for AgroecologyThe
goal of this project is to link regional low flow characteristics to
spatial patterns and trends in land transformation, and to establish
benchmark sustainability measures for managing the growing competition
for Maryland’s limited water resources among demands from agriculture,
forest, and development.

Integrating Real-Time Chemical Sensors
into Understanding of Groundwater Contributions to Surface Water in a
Model Urban ObservatoryPIs: C. Welty, S. Kaushal, P. Groffman, L. Band, A. J. Miller, M. McGuire, R. Maxwell, K. Belt, J. DuncanSponsor: National Science Foundation
The purpose of this project is to build onto previous efforts to
quantify the significance of groundwater in the urban water
cycle. We will deploy nitrate analyzers and electrical
conductivity sensors in Baltimore watersheds and conduct mathematical
modeling to address the following questions: (1) How can sources,
timing and fluxes of solutes from groundwater to surface water vary as
a function land use (ultraurban, suburban, exurban, forest) and stream
position (headwater vs downstream)? (2) How can transport time scales
and subsurface flowpaths vary with flow regime (base flow vs storms)
and antecedent conditions? (3) How can information from high frequency
sensor deployment across a range of hydrologic conditions be used to
“fill in the gaps” from our current weekly long-term monitoring to
explain interannual changes in residence times and flushing of
solutes? (4) How well can a physically-based watershed flow and
transport model represent solute transport behavior across a range of
time scales?

Microbial Nitrogen Sequestration in Detrital-Based Streams of the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Under Stress from Road-Salt RunoffPI: C. SwanSponsor: Maryland Water Resources Research InstituteThis
project is a multi-factorial study to elucidate how ecological
interactions (i.e., organic matter-microbial-invertebrate) react to a
gradient of salt stress currently imposed on freshwater ecosystems in
the region, and how this changes the capacity for the stream community
to remove nitrogen from streams. Road-salt runoff has been
recently identified as a stressor to freshwater streams. Given the
negative effect of salt stress on carbon mineralization that has been
documented for microbial communities in freshwater streams, road salt
is expected to alter rates of nitrogen sequestration. As a result, road
salt runoff might alter the natural ability of headwater streams to
ameliorate excess nutrient delivery to larger, downstream water bodies
(e.g., the Chesapeake Bay). This effect is being evaluated in this
study.

CNH: Collaborative Research: Dynamic Coupling of the Water Cycle with Patterns of Urban GrowthPI:
C. Welty; Co-PIs: AJ Miller, B. Hanlon, M. McGuire; J. Smith (Princeton
U) R. Maxwell (Colorado School of Mines); C. Jantz, S. Drzyzga
(Shippensburg U); E. Doheny (USGS)Sponsor: NSFThe
objective of this work is to link an urban growth model with a
fully-coupled, physically-based three-dimensional hydrologic model to
evaluate the effects of growth on water availability and limits to
water supply using the Baltimore metropolitan region as a case
study. Combining a physically-based regional hydrologic model
with urban growth modeling allows an assessment of the coupled
feedbacks between growth projections (and the socio-economic variables
that affect growth) and surface and subsurface water resources. Changes
in stream base flow and groundwater availability may in turn influence
regulatory decisions on development permits in exurban areas. The
project represents a collaboration among social scientists and physical
scientists having expertise in urban systems. PARFLOW is being used as
the coupled watershed model for this project at the scales of Dead Run,
the Gwynns Falls, and the Gunpowder Patapsco.

Integrative Education, Research, and Training (IGERT) Program “Water in the Urban Environment”PI: C. Welty; Co-PIs: Andrew Miller, Brian Reed, Virginia McConnell, Peter Groffman; 20 senior investigatorsSponsor: NSFUrban
development changes the ways that water moves through the landscape,
altering the water cycle and increasing flood hazards, channel
degradation, and water-quality impairment. These problems have
led to successive generations of regulatory policy and engineering
measures designed to mitigate negative impacts, with varying degrees of
success. The effects on human health and social welfare are complex,
and designing effective long-term solutions requires integrated
ecological, economic and engineering approaches, as well as innovations
in policy-making.

The
UMBC IGERT program centers on three interwoven themes: (1) urban
hydrology and contaminant transport; (2) urban biogeochemical cycles,
aquatic ecosystems, and human health; and (3) urban water policy,
management, and institutions. New integrative curricula have been
developed in Water in the Urban Environment, Research Methods for the
Urban Environment, Modeling and Spatial Statistics for the Urban
Environment, which together with required seminar courses bring
together students from nine Ph.D. degree programs to gain an
appreciation of the varied disciplinary viewpoints, terminology, and
data sets required to address urban environmental problems. All IGERT
Fellows do internships in state or federal agencies and research
laboratories, nongovernmental organizations, industry or consulting, or
teaching, to expand their academic and career path horizons. Up
to 20 PhD students are to be supported by the program.

Science-Based Negotiation of Multiobjective Resources Disputes PI: AJ Miller; co-PIs: M Rivera, Daniel SheerSponsor: NSFAn
academic-industry partnership has been formed to create an upper-level
undergraduate course, Computer Aided Negotiation of Water Resources
Disputes, in which students tackle a real-world, interdisciplinary
problem in the form of an interstate water supply dispute. Students
integrate science, technology, public policy, and law to create
mutually beneficial solutions to resource disputes. Each student plays
the role of a lawyer, biologist, geologist or engineer employed by one
of the water supply stakeholders. The stakeholder groups use (1)
web-based, pedagogically-sound instructional tools, (2) a
multi-disciplinary panel of working professionals, and (3) a computer
model that utilizes linear programming algorithms to derive optimal
solutions in accordance with priorities determined jointly by the
stakeholders. The computer-aided negotiation process, which has been
applied successfully to water resources disputes over the past two
decades, is being used to develop and seek consensus on a set of
operating rules for the system. Students learn to utilize scientific
knowledge and technological tools, function effectively on
interdisciplinary teams, and successfully negotiate with disparate
interests. Moreover, students learn the background information required
to participate in resource negotiations using research-supported
pedagogy. Pilot-Scale Research of Novel Amendment Delivery for In-situ Sediment RemediationPI: U. Ghosh; CA Menzie (Exponent) Sponsor: National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIH)Human
health risks associated with the presence of chemicals in sediments
arise from either direct contact with the sediments or by eating fish
and shellfish that have accumulated chemicals from the sediments.
Emerging laboratory-scale research has shown that contaminant transport
pathways and bioavailability can be interrupted by modifying and
enhancing the binding and contaminant assimilation capacity of natural
sediments. This is achieved by adding sorbent amendments such as
activated carbon for binding persistent organic pollutants and natural
minerals such as apatite, zeolites, or bauxite for the binding of toxic
metals in sediments. Critical barriers in the adoption of this in-situ
remediation approach are the availability of efficient delivery methods
for amendments to impacted sediments and understanding of physical and
biological processes in field sites that control technology
effectiveness. The main aim of this research project is to develop the
in-situ remediation technology through a pilot-scale investigation
aimed at addressing the critical barriers in the advancement of the
technology.

Development
and Application of Tools to Measure PCB Microbial Dechlorination and
Flux into Water During In-situ Treatment of SedimentsPIs: J. Baker, K. Sowers, U. GhoshSponsor: Strategic Environmental Research and Developmental Program (DOD)This
research is quantifying the two most important long-term loss processes
of PCBs in sediments: 1) microbial degradation and 2) diffusive and
resuspension-related losses to the water column. These main PCB loss
mechanisms from sediments depend upon the ease with which PCBs can
partition between solid and porewater phases and may be impacted by
in-situ remediation. Recent laboratory tests demonstrated that
amendment of sediment with activated carbon results in large reductions
in the bioaccumulation of PCBs by clams, worms, and amphipods. Two
important questions that are being addressed in this research are (1)
how is natural PCB microbial dechlorination activity in sediment
affected by the addition of activated carbon and (2) how is PCB
mobility altered by the addition of activated carbon?

Determination
of Sediment Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbon (PAH) Bioavailability using
Supercritical Fluid Extraction (SFE) and Ultra-Trace Porewater (UTP)
AnalysisPIs: D. Nakles, A. Hawkins, S. Hawthorne, T. S. Bridges, U. GhoshSponsor: Environmental Security Technology Certification Program (DOD)This
demonstration/validation project is designed to build upon the data
developed to date demonstrating how site-specific estimates of PAH
bioavailability in freshwater sediments can be used to predict toxicity
to benthic freshwater species. The goal of the project is to extend the
application of supercritical fluid extraction SFE and UTP estimates of
PAH bioavailability to marine/estuarine sediments and species.
Specifically, the project objectives are to (1) use SFE and UTP
analyses to predict the bioavailability of PAHs in marine/estuarine
sediments collected from two Navy facilities, (2) show the relationship
between predictions of PAH bioavailability and the actual measured
toxicity to a marine/estuarine macro invertebrate species and (3)
demonstrate the application and develop technical guidance on the use
of SFE and UTP as site-specific measurements of PAH bioavailability for
assessing risk.